Then & NowSingapore once embraced Europeans, until a campaign made writers like Donald Moore leave

Some of the most revealing published observations of 1950s Hong Kong life and society were written by a man who never lived in the city – Donald Moore. Originally from England, Moore arrived in Singapore with his wife, Joanna, in 1947. The next two decades saw Moore at the pivot of an explosion of artistic, theatrical, literary and musical creativity there. A publisher’s agent and theatrical impresario, as well as a prolific author in his own right, Moore’s work took him all over Asia.

Far Eastern Agent: The Diary of an Eastern Nobody (1953) documents periodic visits to Hong Kong, and contains vivid records of places and people during times of rapid change.

Observations gleaned during these inter­mittent journeys inspired a now unjustly forgotten Hong Kong-themed novel; The Striking Wind (1959) evokes the grossly overcrowded, refugee-thronged colony, gimcrack and shabby beneath the surface glamour, with grinding, omnipresent poverty and the desperate, grubby things that poverty makes people do to survive.

All these themes are sensitively yet unflinchingly explored, with a massive typhoon as a dramatic, ultimately cleansing climax. The main character, an Englishman who should never have come to the Far East, found himself trapped by circum­stance, beached in Hong Kong and unable to leave, even though he desperately wanted to get away from the place and the emotional entanglements life here brought him.

In The Sumatra (1959), set in a fiction­alised yet recognisable Federa­tion of Malaya, Moore explored similar socio-economic themes through the life of a culturally conflicted Eurasian doctor.

In the 1950s, an emergent “pan-Malayan” identity imagined by the intellectual circle Moore encouraged encompassed anyone who made their permanent home in Singapore or Malaya. We Live in Singapore (1955) was part of a concerted pre-independence movement to create a distinct national identity where almost none – whatever present-day propaganda might suggest – had previously existed.

This inclusive early “Singaporean” construction embraced Europeans, and those of European descent, as an essential part of the new country’s emergent cultural matrix. Little remembered today, numerous Europeans became citizens of either Singapore or newly independent Malaya, though few were ever fully accepted by the wider society, much as Hong Kong’s European community are always considered “foreign”, however long they live here.